What

Hello all :)

I have been thinking about this:

A modern composer has reached a much more complete perspective than -let

[Willy, you come out guns blazing, eh! First post and you're gonna drag us down a treacherous and thorny path...fun! ]

My thoughts:

It depends on the intent and the context.

I can easily argue either way, but I feel any composer who ignores or dismisses any tools available is a fool and will produce nothing of value. At the very least, one must be aware and familiar with as many options as possible.

I agree with Robin. I definitely say no to "should we stay immovable, fixed" whatever comes after that, when it comes to composition. There's nothing per se wrong with references to old forms of music, use of tonality, etc. The only thing I'd be extremely careful about is the notion that one can just "use a style". If you just write in a pseudo-baroque fashion because that's what you like, without being aware of the contemporary music you are surrounded with and without thinking about the context in which you are "using the style", there's a danger of ending up in a complacent dead end.

Any "style" is connected to a certain musical tradition, to connotations, symbols and associations, and you should be aware of that when "using" them. You just can't help it that by using ending clauses of the renaissance any listener who knows renaissance music will think of renaissance music and not "just" a nice new sound within a contemporary piece.

So, while it's definitely fine to include "old styles", I think you should first reflect thoroughly on your reasons to do so and be aware that any clear reference to old material is quite a strong effect that is charged with symbolism and connotations. This can both be the strength of your piece, if you consciously make use of this knowledge, or the weakness of it, if it covers up your actual musical intentions.

But I think it's generally not to helpful to strictly think in "styles" anyways, since this just never does actual music justice. You don't write in one clear style or another, generally. You work with old and new elements, with conventions and inventions, and I think it's not too helpful if you think you have to "decide on a style".

...If you just write in a pseudo-baroque fashion because that's what you like, without being aware of the contemporary music you are surrounded with and without thinking about the context in which you are "using the style", there's a danger of ending up in a complacent dead end....

This is what I call "exercises in nostalgia". Useful for understanding historical styles, but often devoid of any creativity or "spark"...

:whistling:

I'm of two minds on this.

Practically? Robin and Gardener are spot-on.

Philosophically, for me? The highest music is that which pushes the limits, in whatever way. (Hypocritically, I love a lot of "safe" music.)

I'm of the opinion that a composer should write whatever appeals to him/her. "Relevance" is rather... irrelevant. If old Baroque music is what appeals to you then go for it. Just keep an open ear to other influences. Most likely, you have to enjoy something that isn't Baroque. I think a composer's own "style" is realized by blending and synthesizing elements of music he/she enjoys into a language that most appeals to him/her. However, if we're talking writing strictly in a style just for the sake of being "authentic", then that's a trickier subject. I could argue either way on that one but I lean more towards not doing it. Write what appeals to you. We live in the 21st century; there are no rules anymore. If you want to write an homeage to Mozart using a structure based around the golden ratio then go ahead. As long as it sounds good to you then do whatever you want.

I am now thinking, for example, in writers. Whatever their style is, think that there is much more resemblance -regarding style, structures etc- between a modern writer and Cervantes, than that of a modern composer and Corelli. And I wonder why.

Why today a writer can work so comfortably with very traditional structures(compared to those of Avant Garde music) than a composer.

Because words =/= sound. I mean, when the book House of Leaves is "cutting edge" fiction, there's an issue. Both film and music have dealt with non-linearity and nonsense.

I dunno, I think there might be some truth to Spengler's take that music is the highest form of art in the west... that might have something to do with it.

Here is my take on this topic... and people are going to be going ugh when I'm through because that's just what people generally do when I respond to anything related to this kind of topic.

I find that the further we go back in history in terms of connecting the music of today to the music of the past, the more academic interest is generally shown to the work (which isn't to say that this interest needs to be associated with historic periods of music - it just tends to happen this way, but there are certainly no absolutes). For example, if you write a contemporary work today with a theoretical application of the baroque style, or the classical, or the romantic, there is a lineage that sometimes results. Creativity is just this simple application of the new being spurned from the past.

Is this the only way to do it? No. You can limit yourself to the commodity of Baroque or Classic style as you learn it in theory. I don't really see the point in doing this, though, as it doesn't really lend your piece any creative spirit. You can also limit yourself to only those things that typify the Contemporary age of music we live in today, those things you'll really only find in the 20th Century. Or, you can formulate your own voice by aggregating the styles and building your own unique sound. I see little room for enlightenment in music beyond this application of styles in music.

A corner is a corner is a corner. You'll just box yourself in creatively if you don't actively try to develop your musical voice in all the areas that have a truly profound influence on you as an artist. This is how Debussy developed his unique sound, by incorporating the Gamelan into his European Musical language with the spirit of Expressionism to guide his language, or how Stravinsky created the Rite of Spring by looking into the styles that typify Primitivism and incorporating those styles into his own language. Such is the same for John C. Adams, George Gershwin, Henry Mancini, John Williams, George Crumb, Elliot Carter, and many, many more.

Take the language, but use it in a way no one has done so before. You have an advanced perspective of music over any of these composers because of their efforts, and that's how we try to branch out from the literature that already exists. As composers, in the general sense, this is our mandate - but certainly not required of us to be successful artists.

It's certainly not a hard-and-fast rule to compose by, but it always helps to keep it all in perspective. You know more than these other composers, you just have to figure out how to "do it" better than they did, which really comes down to your own creativity and subjective interests in music. So, apply the Baroque and Classical styles to your music to your heart's content, because that's what you should be doing if you have an interest in those styles. Just like I will continue to be applying Romanticism, Primitivism, and a variety of other interests I have to the music I write. You've got no glass ceiling here, so go for it.

History will sort out the rest. :)

If I didn't know better, AA, I might think you actually agree with pretty much everything said thus far.

:hmmm:

I'm of the opinion that a composer should write whatever appeals to him/her. "Relevance" is rather... irrelevant. If old Baroque music is what appeals to you then go for it. Just keep an open ear to other influences. Most likely, you have to enjoy something that isn't Baroque. I think a composer's own "style" is realized by blending and synthesizing elements of music he/she enjoys into a language that most appeals to him/her. However, if we're talking writing strictly in a style just for the sake of being "authentic", then that's a trickier subject. I could argue either way on that one but I lean more towards not doing it. Write what appeals to you. We live in the 21st century; there are no rules anymore. If you want to write an homeage to Mozart using a structure based around the golden ratio then go ahead. As long as it sounds good to you then do whatever you want.

I more or less fall in line with this. I write what I want to, and if it sounds late-romantic (as it usually does :whistling:) than so be it.

If I didn't know better, AA, I might think you actually agree with pretty much everything said thus far.

:hmmm:

So far, I haven't seen anything grossly disagreeable, but it's one of these threads that has a ways to go, so you never know. It just that when I make a point that musical style is built from previous styles, somehow people misconstrue me to mean that people should compose those specific styles I might mention. Funny how that happens, but yeah, so far so good.

Which may put my education argument I had in a previous thread into more perspective. Learning the techniques and methods of those styles a composer intends to use to carve out their own sound is generally the goal of education. However, it's not always possible for composers to get that kind of guidance in universities because of this notion that everything a composer writes in composition lessons should sound like 20th Century music. Sure, at least one work should sound like a 20th Century work, mainly that major project someone writes after they've learned what it takes to write in the styles of other composers.

Okay, veered off topic for a bit, but yeah, I agree with just about everything I've read in the thread so far... :)

But, as Gardener has put it in other threads, contemporary music is much "closer" than Bach, who lived 300 years ago..

And I don't think it's so much about a work sounding 21st-century, but a work belonging to the 21st-century. And that's a big difference. Michael Nyman, whom most people from in here know from his film music, and most famously from the movie "The Piano", you might say that his "style" is kind of minimalistic-romantic, but that would be a terribly biased opinion; the fact that this particular soundtrack sounds in that kind of style is because he is well aware of many genres and compositions, composers, trends and styles (some of which is displayed in his 1974 book "Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond" in which he tries to address what experimental music is about and how it is different than "avant-garde" music), and he simply chose to write in that style for that particular movie because either the director wanted him to, or he wanted to write something The Audience would enjoy. But that composition is the result of all this knowledge, not the result of his ignorance of it. That's what makes that piece 20th-century, and that's what also makes Laurence Crane's pieces 21st-century (although they definitely don't sound like Stockhausen's or Boulez's, or what most people from in here have an idea of what "20th-century music" sounds like..) as well as Michel van der Aa's adventures with acoustics, electronic music and film.

As you've already guessed, I am not saying that learning how to compose in other styles is bad, or studying older scores is bad, all I am saying is, since the 40's and 50's, people tried to re-write music from scratch, and their music tried to have as less resemblance to the music of the past as possible. So there, you see, the timeline is broken and music stops being a continuous tradition, a single thread that keeps developing, because suddenly thousands of little things start sprouting here and there and there's so many things going on so quickly, that no one can really keep track of it all. And that's what contemporary music is really, it's not a movement, it's not a single tradition (other than that we are all writing things that are aural and are heard by other people, although this has been challenged a lil' bit too..), it's everyone's music.

So why shouldn't you just jump straight in and do it? (assuming you have a mature way of thinking and will look into why you feel certain music feels more "natural" than others and understand why these composers did what they did and how) (and don't just "compose in the style you like", but do some research, and by that I mean at least read "A Very Short Introduction to Music" by Nicholas Cook -not a very short introduction at all, in fact- and have a more broad point of view on music and musical aesthetics than the average person, because it so happens that composers are not average people) (not that they shouldn't be) (or that they won't be) (....) (composers of the world, UNITE!)

I second what Nirvana says.

So there, you see, the timeline is broken and music stops being a continuous tradition, a single thread that keeps developing, because suddenly thousands of little things start sprouting here and there and there's so many things going on so quickly, that no one can really keep track of it all. And that's what contemporary music is really, it's not a movement, it's not a single tradition (other than that we are all writing things that are aural and are heard by other people, although this has been challenged a lil' bit too..), it's everyone's music.

Speaking of chaos, what the hell is going on in your country?? (Or at least in Athens and Salonica)

Berlioz: it's a long story.. but it's not just recent events that have caused all this, it's the government and its attitude towards its citizens for the past decade at least, and there comes a point where people can't take it anymore, and event like the ones of last week just sparked of that whole rage. Usually, in protests and stuff, there's about 40-50 "guys with hoods" (that's how we call them, the "familiar unknown", because everyone knows who they are, and they're there in every protest) and all they do is gently caress up the protest and start making it into a hooligan fest.. But this time, it wasn't just those 40-50 guys, it was everyone - lawyers, doctors, journalists, teachers, students, they were all there in the streets.

*sigh*

as I said, it's a long story.. :P

But, as Gardener has put it in other threads, contemporary music is much "closer" than Bach, who lived 300 years ago..

Closer? Bach is closer than you think to contemporary music. He was one of the first to start working with 12-tone melodic lines. Closer only concerns "time", not the overall literature.

As you've already guessed, I am not saying that learning how to compose in other styles is bad, or studying older scores is bad, all I am saying is, since the 40's and 50's, people tried to re-write music from scratch, and their music tried to have as less resemblance to the music of the past as possible. So there, you see, the timeline is broken and music stops being a continuous tradition, a single thread that keeps developing, because suddenly thousands of little things start sprouting here and there and there's so many things going on so quickly, that no one can really keep track of it all. And that's what contemporary music is really, it's not a movement, it's not a single tradition (other than that we are all writing things that are aural and are heard by other people, although this has been challenged a lil' bit too..), it's everyone's music.

But it's not "everyone's music" if you consider what is not included in the mainstream of contemporary musical thought. In this state of mind, anything preceding the 40s and 50s where people just started re-writing music basically was done away with... so anyone interested in the pre-40's styles are, what, S.O.L.? It's Music's Armageddon to think that music from pre-1940 doesn't belong in the 21st Century. There's no incentive or reason to keep studying the past if it doesn't belong in the present.

So why shouldn't you just jump straight in and do it?

I'm sorry I don't share your enthusiasm. But I guess I just don't qualify as a 21st Century composer because I favor pre-1940 styles. Your entire point seems to be that because the timeline is broken, we can branch out and "finally explore" sound. We can do whatever we want. Yay!

And that's great and all, but at some point you face the reality that what you're doing isn't building on anything. It just exists, and it exists only in the moment, almost never existing again in another way. It may be that you can have all these styles and do whatever you want, but what is it to create all these "new things" and do nothing with them?

Because that's what happens. These contemporary works very rarely carry over to each other and when they do, they often sound like another Avant Garde composer's work. The germane characteristics of these works are so specific that the carry-over is unintentional, but it is what it is. By now, it's almost impossible to do something that hasn't already been done because of how this happens.

See, time really isn't the issue here. It's about the substance of the works, and so far, contemporary music as we know it today has no identifying feature other than it's a melting pot. It's a soup of styles, spicy and invigorating to some, but bland or over-seasoned to others. I'm of the latter. I get little to no inspiration from most contemporary music. I enjoy listening to many a contemporary work, but they don't inspire me to write in this way. I'm more inspired by Wagner, Britten, Stravinsky, early Schoenberg, and some Berg. I get more out of tonal works today, like QCC's Symphony No. 1 posted here on the forums.

It's not that I'm afraid to explore, I just don't see the point because that ship sailed over 30 years ago. If you like to be the music treasure hunter, then go for it, and if you find something I like, then I'll happily tell you. But that's not the goal of every composer. Some of us just want to be appreciated for the music that inspires us, even if that music happens to be pre-1940s.

It's not some huge conspiracy to do away with tonality and tradition- they're just trying to write new music

There's all sorts of things, but hilariously everything is a consequence of what came before, in one way or another. So regardless, tradition is the direct cause of the anti-traditionalism movements and also the neo-traditionalist stuff, etc. Everyone has their own reasons, and maybe there is a conspiracy that both exists and doesn't at the same time depending on who you ask.

I couldn't honestly care less about what people do or think about this crap since it's totally up to taste. Nirvana already said it, I'm not going to repeat it.

I use my own style.

I have a doubt which is making me to think since some time ago: Alejandro Sanz, Enrique Iglesias, Britney Spears, Cold Play,Winehouse do sing contemporary music?

I am not a fan of them neither listen their music, but I wonder if is possible that we

Let's not confuse time with style. Obviously they're "contemporaries" to us, but "contemporary music" can mean thousands of things (in which simple popularity is not a deciding factor in anything.)

I agree, and there is an inevitable and broad causality to these things, but the way AA talks about modern music is overly simplistic.

I'm sure you can imagine why I have AA on ignore, yes?

I agree, and there is an inevitable and broad causality to these things, but the way AA talks about modern music is overly simplistic. He makes it seem like everyone is in on some huge movement when that's not the case- there are tons of small movements, genres and schools and styles (and some ppl entirely independent) that constitute "contemporary music". It shouldn't all be lumped together as one kind of music and, in my opinion labels like baroque, classical, Italian etc. are also waaaay overly simplistic

Would you prefer I write a book on it and give you every excrement of detail about every style ever imagined from 1940 to 1990? Really? You have to wonder why some of these "labels" are so simple, because it helps in understanding the bigger picture.

If I asked you, "How do you ride a bike?" would you proceed to get down to the tiniest detail like the muscles involved, their names, the time it should take to complete one "pedaling" of the bike? Of course you wouldn't. There's nothing wrong with trying to grasp the bigger picture, and even though it leaves out certain exceptions to statements, the general material is there to create a coherent thought about it.

You're calling me a "conspiracy theorist" for responding to Juji's claim about the timeline being disrupted, making such works reaching further in history (pre-1940) "un-"contemporary? Get a grip and stop being so sensitive...

This is a thread that fascinates me, because as a theatre composer, it's always the story/character that drives the music. There are certain sounds that can be associated with characters who live in certain time periods, in certain areas of the world. On the one hand, the sounds identify them for the audience, on the other hand, the sounds become the musical vernacular for the characters and inform their stance on the issues being discussed.

Even when I write a cabaret song, I take into account a myriad of things about the "character" singing before I set anything hard and fast in the music.

I'm just saying the same that I've always said: you can't lump all these aesthetics and styles together and call it "contemporary" or "post-1940" or "atonal" or whatever title you want to give it.

There is a huge variety of music... you can use more specific labels like serialism, 20th century primitivism, hair metal, minimalism, early modernism, postmodernism, math rock, polystylistic music, americana, neo-classical or neo-romantic, spectralism etc.

No, that's fair. I think you're missing where I'm going with my "label" of contemporary music as a "melting pot." Just as you describe it above, there are all these styles being "created" to the point that beyond their creation, nothing is done with them. Composers are so busy creating new styles, and perhaps too afraid to sound like one another, using another composer's language is paramount to "copying" as opposed to "developing" such a language.

Seems you're too concerned about the labels I'm using and not the argument I'm making. You can call it whatever you want. I'm saying that these styles are so segregated from one another that none of them are being developed to their greater potential at any significant degree. Moreover, the germane characteristics of these styles make it even more difficult to distinguish one's own sound from the composer who developed said style. They are so isolated that none of these styles seem to be applicable across the board to different extremes.

Now, one can make the claim that such systems as serialism and minimalism seem pretty well-equipped to handle many extremes of composition. I have to agree with this, but it brings me to ask if we can even call serialism or minimalism a "style" as opposed to a "system." To some, the subtleties of Webern and Boulez seem too subtle to differentiate one from the other, at least from a musical content standpoint. How does one make such a distinction beyond the highly analytical process it would take to draw such distinctions between them? How does the common ear reinforce those distinctions?

I don't know how to explain it any better than that. I hope you're starting to see what I'm getting at, but if not, I'll explain further if necessary.